Sunday, July 15, 2012

Rats overboard

by digby

Unless this is all an elaborate ruse and all these people know that there's nothing in Mitt's tax returns to give anyone pause, this sounds to me like a bunch of people who already pretty much know they are going to lose and are pre-emptively distancing themselves from the loser:

To politicos across the ideological spectrum, Romney’s unwillingness to release anything beyond these two years raises the question: if it’s worth the bad press to keep the tax returns private, they must contain something worse.“The cost of not releasing the returns are clear,” said conservative columnist George Will, on ABC’s “This Week.” “Therefore, he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.”

On the ABC roundtable, Republican strategist Matthew Dowd had a similar take.

“There’s obviously something there, because if there was nothing there, he would say, ‘Have at it,’” Dowd said. “So there’s obviously something there that compromises what he said in the past about something.”

“Many of these politicians think, ‘I can do this. I can get away with this. I don’t need to do this, because I’m going to say something and I don’t have to do this,’” Dowd said. “If he had 20 years of ‘great, clean, everything’s fine,’ it’d all be out there, but it’s arrogance.”

In the last week, several Republicans have advised Romney to release his returns. That list includes former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former RNC chairman Michael Steele and Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, who called for “total transparency” and said he releases all his tax returns. On “Fox News Sunday,” the Weekly Standard’s editor Bill Kristol added his voice to the list as well, calling for Romney to “release the tax returns tomorrow” and “take the hit for a day or two.”

I'm pretty sure that if Mitt loses it won't be spun as being due to his career as a vulture capitalist. It will be because he was too moderate. But they have a while to let that marinate.